§17 · Custody and permanence

The export and the mirrors

The Register survives by being copied, not by being kept. We are one custodian among several, and no single party’s failure ends it.

The complete export

A complete public export is refreshed at least daily. It is the files themselves — one per Entry, Record, Practice Record and Condition Observation — not a rendering of them.

• export.json — every file with its SHA-256 and the day’s root.
• index.json — the search index, which is a file rather than a database.
• digest/latest.txt — the current root and every leaf hash. Past roots stay published under their own timestamps.
• /export/ — the files themselves, at /export/[kind]/[identifier].txt.
• mirror.py — takes a complete copy in one command.
• verify.py — the independent verifier.

Bulk export of public fields is available on request at contact@rootandbranchregister.org.

Mirrors

We maintain a complete public export and invite and support not fewer than three independent parties to hold complete mirrors, preferring libraries, archives, trade bodies and universities over commercial hosts. A mirror needs no agreement with us and no software from us: it needs the files, the digest and forty lines of Python to check that the two agree.

If you hold collections in a trade, a craft school, a university library or a state archive and would take a mirror, write to contact@rootandbranchregister.org. There is no cost and no obligation, and you may stop at any time.

What we promise to keep, and what we do not

We undertake to preserve the text of Entries, Records and Practice Records indefinitely. We do not undertake to preserve capture media indefinitely, and we say so rather than promising what no entity can deliver. Media is preserved with best effort and migrated while that remains practical; its hash is preserved with the Record permanently, so that any surviving copy can be verified against the Record forever (§17.3).

If we stop

If the Registrar ceases to operate, the complete export passes to the successor archive named under §17.5. The corpus is published under a share-alike license and is already in other people’s hands by the time that matters. That is the point of publishing it this way.